Tom DeLay was found guilty in 2011 of illegally directing corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002; a court has now reversed that sentence. Photograph: Jack Plunkett/AP

Tom DeLay, scourge of liberals and Tea Party inspiration (aka "The Hammer"), got out of jail free last week. His conviction – a political revenge conviction if ever there was one – for all manner of largely nonspecific skullduggery that, actually, he was probably guilty of, but which was not necessarily against the law, was overturned by a Texas appeals court.

In fact, DeLay never quite got to jail. While his appeals have winded on, he has developed a lucrative speaking business and appeared on Dancing with the Stars. But as punishment for his wild over-reaching and general incivility, his power was taken away and his political career ruined.

Not long before his troubles began, I sat in the DeLay family kitchen – oddly, taken by a British friend whose accent and manners seemed to amuse the DeLays – looking out over the golf course in Sugar Land, Texas, where DeLay has a condo. We had take-out barbeque with DeLay and his wife and daughter, while DeLay expansively outlined why liberals were so dim and pathetic.

Certainly nothing about my visit – including the strange collection of tchotchkes that overloaded the house, or his inspirational homily about firearms, or his ebullient dismissal of the masculinity of his opponents, or his surprise that I don't drive a car ("What are you, retarded?") – convinced me that he was anything other than a former pest exterminator and dangerous rightwinger, who would do just about anything to defenestrate a liberal, or, preferably, all of them.

Possibly the weirdest experience I have ever had followed the barbeque lunch. DeLay took us far out into the remote and undeveloped reaches beyond Houston to see the town he had built amid the sage brush for orphans: a government-funded Dickensian village of prefab houses gathered around a central church. What country were we in?

And yet, I liked "The Hammer". Well, like is a strong word. Nothing that he said was familiar or hardly even acceptable, and yet his enthusiasm, even for wacko notions, was infectious. And I admit to a little pause when, not long after, his opponents managed to get him convicted. You don't so easily wish prison on someone whose barbeque you've eaten (even take-out). And, indeed, I sent him a congratulatory note last week when his conviction was overturned.

And that is surely part of my point: we shouldn't try to unfairly imprison our political enemies. And yet, what do you do with them?

Delay used to seem extreme and anomalous. Somehow, the exterminator had leaped logic and sense to make it into Congress, without being much socialized by the process. Democracy, of course, occasionally produces a too-rough beast. And the system worked in its fashion, even if somewhat less than honorably. Rough justice eventually excluded him. Indeed, his own party hardly defended him, and rather obviously, breathed a sigh of relief at his kangaroo impeachment.

But then, as if in some cosmic or comic revenge, the Tea Party suddenly rose in his image. His is their career path: from unlikely, if not fantastic, outsider status to civic prominence and power. His philosophy – nihilist, and nativist to the point of primitivism – is theirs. His method of power, leverage through the threat of disruption, is their paradigm.

DeLay, it turns out, was not an anomaly, but merely, the first wave of the alien invasion of Congress that seems to defy all national political trends. And now, it has set about trying to close the government to choke the Obama healthcare law.

For liberals, this has now become something of a gritted-teeth endurance test. There is always the hope that these "Little Hammers" will be co-opted by the system, and come to have interests that they are willing to bargain for. Ironically, getting rid of DeLay, who did have interests to protect – like his subsidized orphan villages – may have had the unintended consequence of removing the one person who could have exerted some control over the aliens.

And then, there is the hope that they are self-destructive. DeLay, too, was full of hubris and the intoxication of power, setting himself up for an inevitable fall. The system revolted against him. Liberals reasonably believe that the crazies will destroy the Republican party, or that the Republican party will get its act together and destroy them. Either way.

And there is hope in demographics. Even Sugar Land, the DeLay base, is changing. There will be ever-fewer old, white, rural majorities, which are needed to elect these retro white guys.

This column cannot, alas, reach the conclusion that its beginning might suggest that if only liberals would just sit down with the gargoyles of American politics and break bread (or stuff themselves with pulled pork), there might be some mutual understanding. Quite the opposite.

There may never have been a moment in American politics when the divide between sides has been so ridiculous, and the deviation from the norm so great, and the culture gap so preposterous. Still, they can't all be prosecuted. So, it really is just about waiting it out.

Judging from my lunch with Tom DeLay, though, I would definitely suggest doing everything possible to see this overweening rococo nativism as up-close as possible. It's not without its unlikely charisma.

• Dinner in the last paragraph was amended to lunch, at 1pm (ET) on 23 September